Artist Steve McQueen's work is what it is: Not as it seems

"Western Deep/Caribsí Leap" (2002) by Steve McQueen from the "Steve McQueen" exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Western Deep/Caribsí Leap" (2002) by Steve McQueen from the "Steve McQueen" exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lori Waxman

The celebrated British artist Steve McQueen has made two feature films in the past few years. "Hunger" won the Camera d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for its vision of Irish Republican Army bomber Bobby Sands, and the hunger strike that ended his life in a Northern Ireland prison. "Shame," which was chosen as best foreign film at the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards, portrayed a man addicted to sex.

But though the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago have been darkened to the pitch blackness of a theater to accommodate a capacious, elegantly installed 20-year McQueen retrospective, don't go expecting an experience akin to watching a movie — not McQueen's movies or anyone else's. The art on view is mostly moving images — there's video, film, a slide projection and an anomalous sculpture — but the experience is nothing like cinema.

Forget narrative. Forget dialogue. Forget voices. Most of the time, forget even place, space, beginning and end. Most of all, forget metaphor.

These absences won't shock anyone familiar with the history of video art or experimental film. But they feel like a big part of the challenge and the effect of McQueen's work, which can be mystifying despite its unstinting directness. In his films, things are what they are. But that doesn't make it easy.

What's left after the removal of all those cinematic elements depends on the individual work. "Current" paints a big, beautiful picture of a dappled river, half in shade, half in light. Something lies just under the surface of the water, causing the sun to glint in circles. Watch the subtle double slide projection long enough, and that thing materializes as an abandoned bicycle. Resolution demands a slowness of looking akin to actually staring at a river in sunlight.

The silent "Charlotte" presents an extreme close-up of the eye of veteran British actress Charlotte Rampling, plus a few other bits of her face. The director's finger probes her pupil — she barely blinks — and pushes her closed eyelid — the sagging skin fails to spring back into place. Shot in 16 mm film and screened with an increasingly rare 16 mm projector, "Charlotte" has endlessly available details. A dark clump of makeup on the lower rim emerges intimate and fraught, bathed in crimson light.

In "Static," the Statue of Liberty appears as never quite before, though nothing about her is really altered. For seven minutes the camera circles, treating her as a true sculpture in the round, sometimes getting in close enough to notice the stains in her armpit or the sternness of her expression. The point of view dizzies, and the statue, rather than the camera, seems to be in motion. She moves, she dances, she drifts and backs up. She has half a dozen different backdrops, from the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan to the forested industrial zone of New Jersey and the shimmering seascape of New York Harbor. The loud drone of the director's helicopter alternates with silence, for a soundtrack that's part terror, part contemplation.

"Static" was completed in 2009, and it belongs resolutely to a post-9/11 world. The copter noise wouldn't frighten nearly so much otherwise, and America's icon of freedom probably wouldn't be so appealing a subject. (It's no coincidence that McQueen's likeness of Liberty isn't the only one in town right now. See Danh Vo's fragmented re-creation in We the People in the Art Institute's Pritzker Garden and at the University of Chicago.)

What's striking about McQueen's foray into political portraiture is that it isn't political. There's no politics in his politics here, just as there's no politics in "Western Deep," his terrorizing, claustrophobic film about the miners of TauTona, the South African mine that is the deepest in the world.

Just as there's no identity politics in the black male bodies of early works like "Deadpan," a willfully serious, formal remake of a famous Buster Keaton scene, starring McQueen as the man who is unharmed by a house falling around him. (It won McQueen the 1999 Turner Prize.) Or "Bear," his degree film at Goldsmiths College in London, which begins with two naked black men engaged in a headlock and ends with them in an erotic embrace.

Just as there's no partisan politics in "Illuminer," a video from 2001 showing the artist sprawled out on a hotel bed in Paris, his dark body brightened only by the light of a television set. A local news program blares a report on post-9/11 American military training. The occasional English phrase merges with the colors of the screen to paint a fuzzy picture of red, white and blue violence. Even in French, TV loudness hurts. McQueen's body at one point disappears into the sheets, and the twisted bundle becomes an abstract form of projected color, a mysterious sight for night-vision goggles.

This is a culture in which war is televised nightly, and without it the artist's body vanishes into darkness. That's grim, but it isn't particularly pointed, nor is "Queen and Country," McQueen's memorial to the British men and women killed during the Iraq War. The artist spent six days in Basra as an official war artist but ultimately found inspiration while mailing a letter — he decided that a stamp ought to be issued for each of the dead. The result is completely atypical of McQueen in format but utterly him in its political approach. With the agreement of the families of the deceased, sheets were printed up and housed in an oak cabinet, in drawers reminiscent of flat files and the morgue.

Despite the inescapably moving but ultimately neutral nature of McQueen's gesture, the Royal Mail has refused to issue the stamps.